It’s reached that time of year where I’ve hit my work wall. I need a holiday.
I had Friday off work, so I effectively had a 3 day weekend, and yet it still didn’t feel like anywhere near enough.
This weekend we had a wedding to go to, and it reminded me how much I enjoy wearing dresses. I normally wear jeans every day – I don’t even get to wear summer dresses or skirts to work, because it would make me way over dressed (since my office is attached to a factory in an industrial estate).
I usually only get to wear a dress if we’re going out somewhere special, like a wedding or..... something else that calls for formalwear. Actually, mostly just weddings.
We don’t get to go to anywhere near enough formal events. There’s something about putting on a pretty dress that makes you feel incredibly good about yourself. And you know that statement is true, because it’s not just women that get a kick out of it – there are a hell of a lot of men who are partial to a bit of dress wearing.
So if you’re like me and are feeling like you’ve had enough of 2009, try putting on a dress – it will help, I swear.
So you’ll have to forgive me for being slack about posting last week, but it’s been quite a busy one. It was my mother-in-law’s wedding and a friend’s 30th birthday - and to top it all off, I got a fantastic almost-migraine that had me in bed all through Friday and Saturday and left me feeling ill all weekend. Fun times.
Ahhh, there’s nothing like starting the week with excuses. But I’m trying to make up for it by posting twice today. Does it count as twice if one of those posts was supposed to be Saturday’s?
The wedding was a Sunday night thing, which is fine, but in all honesty, I am absolutely stuffed this morning. It finished up early – about 10:30 – but a wedding is still a long day, even when it’s shorter than average. And because I’m still not well, I was kept up all night by these crazy dreams about running around the airport about to miss my flight because I’d lost my bag with my ticket in it. Perhaps the headaches mean that I’m going nuts.
After thinking the dress dilemma through on Friday/Saturday, I decided on the pretty one rather than the sexy one and it was definitely the right choice. I had a whole lot of strangers tell me that it looked really nice, so that’s got to be a good sign. Actually, they weren’t strangers; they were relatives-in-law. I think. To be honest, I have no idea. They’re the kind of people you see maybe once a year, and when you do, you can’t ask their names because they all remember your name and you’re stuck in that kind of awkward conversation that goes exactly like this with every single person:
Them: Hi Torrygirl!
Me: Oh, hi....er, ah...(giving up on trying to remember their name) How are you?
Them: (as if we’re long time friends) I’m great! How have you been, I haven’t seen you in quite a while!
Me: (not quite believing we’ve ever met before) Er, yeah, it’s been ages hasn’t it?
Them: How are your parents? And your brother and sister? And that cute little niece and nephew?
And that’s about where I give up and try to sneak away from the conversation without them noticing - which mostly ends up with them thinking I’m really rude, but since I only ever see them once a year, I’m not that fussed about what they think.
Except, of course, for the bit where they tell me I look nice ;)
Oh No! In the chaos of the wedding weekend, I didn’t get around to blogging on my absolute favourite holiday of the year!!!! Saturday was International Talk Like A Pirate Day and I missed it!!!
I was going to blog like a pirate today using this tool
and Google stuff in pirate speak here
But instead we ran around all day preparing for the wedding and going to a 30th that got rained out (actually hailed out to be more precise).
What I had been hoping to share with you on International Talk like a Pirate Day is a little insight into accents that I had. Despite the fact that I missed the day, I’ll share it with you anyway, because let’s be honest, Pirate stuff is interesting every day.
Whenever you watch documentaries about movies and stuff, Actors are always saying how an Australian accent is one of the hardest for them to imitate. In fact, I have yet to hear a convincing Aussie accent from anyone in Hollywood. Thinking about talk like a pirate day, it struck me that the American accent is a lot like a pirate accent. All of the ‘r’ sounds are pronounced like a pirate style ‘arhh’, whereas an Australian ‘r’, on the other hand, is pronounced more like a terrified yelp - ‘ahhh!’
So basically, if you’re an Aussie who wants to sound American, try a bit of a pirate accent and if you’re an American who wants to sound like an Aussie, just sound a bit terrified when you speak and that should do the trick!
Happy belated Talk Like A Pirate Day everyone!
With my Mother-in-Law’s wedding coming up this weekend, I find myself presented with a bit of a dilemma. It is a two dress dilemma.
A couple of weeks ago, I bought a dress to wear to the wedding. It’s a short-ish, halter neck, figure hugging sort of thing that would most definitely fall into the category of being a sexy dress. It’s not slutty sexy by any means - it’s tasteful sexy, but a bit revealing and short none-the-less.
I had a bit of time to think about it after getting home and began to wonder if a sexy dress like that would be appropriate for the wedding of my Mother-in-Law to a Church Minister. Is there an expectation of a certain dress code dependent upon the type of people getting married? What sort of people would be at the wedding of a Minister? And what will my family-in-law think of me if for some reason they’re all wearing full length turtle neck dresses and I’m wearing an incredibly hot little dress?
With this little seed of doubt planted, I found myself shopping for another dress. The second one I ended up with would fall more into the ‘pretty and girly’ category of dress. It’s a floaty silk dress, still only knee length, but definitely appropriate for any occasion.
The dilemma I face now is that after trying them both on one after the other, I’m torn! The first dress is definitely more revealing, but it’s HOT and in turn makes me look pretty damn good.
But then the second dress is pretty too and will be comfortable to dance in. It also has the benefit of being a nicer colour than the first dress – it’s a deep aqua colour, where the first dress is a pale pink-ey/beige-ey colour.
What to do? Pretty vs sexy. Which should it be? If I was single it would be an easy decision – sexy would win hands down. But I’m not, and to be fair, if I was I wouldn’t be going to this wedding.
Am I missing anything here? Is there a valid reason to choose one over the other? If I can’t come up with something, I’m going to have to make a snap decision on the day and possibly risk making the wrong choice. Maybe I should return them both and just buy something else.
It’s funny how quickly the days can get away from you, isn’t it? I can’t believe it’s Sunday already, and that we’re in the middle of August.
This means it’s only 5 weeks until my mother-in-law’s wedding. I’ve been thinking about it a lot and have a family relationships question. I have both a mother-in law and a father-in-law. They are divorced and now my mother-in-law is marrying her boyfriend (the minister). Once they are married, does this mean that he then becomes my father-in-law or my step-father -in-law? Or maybe something different all together? If he becomes my second father-in-law, this leaves me with the possibility of having two mother-in-laws, and although I get along fine with my current mother-in-law, there is a certain negative connotation that goes with mothers-in-law that means that having two is probably not anyone’s preferred situation.
I can’t imagine anyone becoming a step-father when his wife’s kids are already adults, because there is little fathering left to do once they’re at that age. There must be some other title for him to go by when I need to explain his relationship to me. I know it won’t come up in conversation very often, but when it does, I need to have some way of describing our relationship.
Maybe mother-in-law’s-husband-in law?
Saturday night was the dreaded Hen’s night. I managed to sneak out early, using the excuse of driving home my pregnant sister-in-law, but unfortunately not early enough to avoid the stripper. I have to say that as far as strippers go he was quite tasteful. Ish. I’m not sure tasteful is a word that you can really use when it comes to a stripper, but I can’t think of anything more appropriate.
He was dressed as a cop and I have to give him credit because he was actually a reasonably good dancer. The lewd gyrating was kept to a minimum, but I’m not sure that that was because of tasteful dancing, or the inability of his hips to cope with the movements. Which brings me to my point for this blog post – at what age do you become too old to be a stripper?
Now I’m not suggesting that he was old, because he wasn’t. But given that the primary job of a stripper of this sort is to perform at hen’s nights, there comes an age where you will realise that you’re stripping in front of people who could, given an unfortunate virginity losing mishap back in your young and wild days, be your daughter. Or at least, your daughter’s slightly older friends.
The point I’m making here is that the stripper seemed a bit too old for the crowd he was performing in front of. At a guess I would say he was pushing 40. Now to me that’s not a huge age difference, but add a few more years difference for the bride and her friends who are quite a bit younger and it’s a pretty fair sort of age gap!
There must be an age that you reach when you start to realise that you’re closer to the age of the mother of the bride than to the bride herself. Wouldn’t that make it a little awkward? Or is that awkwardness overridden by the total awkwardness of getting nude in front of a room full of strangers?
Either way, the stripper wasn’t as bad as I imagined, but this could be mostly attributed to the fact that he respected my baby oil free perimeter and kept well clear.
I think the most appropriate description of the stripper is the one my grandma often uses about a favourite song – he was an oldie but a goodie.
I’ve finally managed to write all of my thank you cards for the wedding. Better late than never, right? It was painful trying to think of unique and meaningful things to write. I sort of wish that I had just printed a generic thank you note and posted that out the week after the wedding. At least that way it wouldn’t have reached the point where people just assumed that the thank you’s had been forgotten. But I wanted to be specific about thanking people, so that it was all a little more personal. I just didn’t expect that it would take quite this long. I suppose a late thank you is better than no thank you at all.
Now all that’s left is to lick 52 stamps and send them out. Yum. Can’t wait for that. Ok, I’m lying, I don’t intend to lick ANY stamps. Not after finding that the wedding stamps for the invitations weren’t self adhesive and I had to lick over 100 of those little buggers. I suppose that’s the price I pay for being a perfectionist about my wedding invitations. I might just lower my standards a little for the thank you cards – you know, In aid of getting them sent out sometime this year.
It's the end of my third week in the new job and I think I’m finally getting into the swing of things. It's still a little weird working with so many men, but I think I’m getting used to it. It's a lot less social than working with women - unless, of course, you fancy talking about cars all day.
It's also a bit strange because they have very different policies on things than they did in my last job. At the last place, you pretty much had free reign to organise whatever you thought the company needed. Here, they had an entire meeting because I suggested that perhaps having a company letterhead might be a good idea and they had to discuss whether having a printed letterhead would change the way their customers viewed their business. Personally, I have to say that I wouldn't think twice about a letter on company letterhead, but I would think twice about spending $60K with a company whose quote looked like it had been printed by a primary school student. So it's a bit of an adjustment trying to get used to fighting to get basic things done.
More interestingly, we started organising some of the more formal parts of our wedding this week. We spoke to the minister that will be marrying us and signed some of the paperwork. It was a truly weird experience, speaking to someone other than KJ about why we care about each other so much and why we want to get married. It's the kind of stuff that comes easily when you speak to each other, but it's a bit embarrassing when you have to tell someone else. Normally, people just accept that if you're a couple, then you love each other - they don't ask you to explain it all. I guess it's all just part of the whole wedding thing - in a couple of months we'll be saying it all in front of 140 of our friends and family, so I need to get used to it!
One week to go. Five more working days and I am done. It has gone a lot faster than I thought it would, and my frustration at being delayed in handing things over has turned to a kind of stress that I won't get it all done in time. Deep down, I don't really care though. I just want to get away and start fresh. I'm looking forward to leaving the stress behind and being the person who doesn't know all the answers and sometimes has to hunt out some work to do. That will be nice.
In other news, one of my friends has decided that she finally needs to break up with her boyfriend of two years. It's something she has put off doing for the last few months.
Unfortunately, they live together in a unit with only 2 bedrooms, and the other is occupied by a room mate - a friend of her boyfriends. This means that she needs somewhere to stay while she looks for a place of her own. This means she is staying with us for the next 3 weeks. I'm happy to have her stay, because she's a friend and I want to help her out - it's just unfortunate that she is a high maintenance kind of friend and there is a good chance that we'll end up hating each other within a week or two. Also, I'm kind of used to it just being KJ & I, so it will be strange to come home to having someone else in the house.
I've never had a room-mate before; I went straight from living at home with my parents to buying a house of my own. I chose to do that because I didn't think I was the kind of person who would deal well with having other people around all the time. With KJ it's different because we are happy to share anything and everything. With a room-mate, everyone has different boundaries and I don't have the kind of patience necessary to put up with the crossing of these imaginary boundaries.
I will be an interesting few weeks, but hopefully with the new job and trying to organise things for the wedding (which is sneaking up scarily quickly) it will go pretty quickly.
I'm going to
On the plus side, my bosses' penchant for treating themselves to the insanely overpriced means that we're staying in a 5 star hotel while we're there, so I can't complain about that! On an even brighter note, there is a bridal shoe store about half a kilometre from the hotel that I really want to go to. I am beginning to get desperate to find a pair of white shoes that won't require a bank loan for me to buy. Have I mentioned before how insanely overpriced weddings are?
10 more days and this conference will be over and i can have my spare time back!!
In all of my banging on about the fabulous dress that I wanted to wear to the wedding last weekend, I never mentioned the other interesting facts about the couple who tied the knot. By the ‘other’ interesting facts, I really mean any of the interesting facts, because obviously, their wedding ran a distant third to the fact that I got a new dress and I got to catch up (and dance) with friends that I haven’t seen in over a year.
So here they are, Interesting facts about Ingrid and Boris*
1. Ingrid and Boris met online many many years ago. I have never been told the real story about where online they met, so I choose to believe that they met on a forum for people with rare and uninteresting pets.
2. Ingrid is an Aussie and Boris is an American. Not just any kind of American, but the kind that has an intense accent, as though he has just stepped out of the TV and into the reception venue. He pronounces her name in a way that is incredibly humorous; the humor of which I cannot convey fully in this blog as I have changed her name to Ingrid.
3. Ingrid is meek, quiet and says little. Mostly she just giggles. At everything. All the time. During their wedding vows, the celebrant said that Ingrid liked Boris because Boris made her laugh. This made me giggle.
4. Ingrid’s mother is a pushy, overbearing woman who will not let Ingrid do anything for herself. She was very upset when she found that Ingrid had agreed to marry Boris without her knowing anything about the proposal and without Ingrid asking for her approval. She vented this anger by organizing the entire wedding on Ingrid’s behalf
5. Ingrid looked gorgeous on her wedding day.
6. I thought I would have at least 6 points, but it turns out that Ingrid and Boris aren’t as interesting as I first thought.
I’m off to another wedding this weekend. I’m looking forward to this one, especially as we’re going to have our makeup done. I had my makeup done for my brothers wedding last year – it was great! I would kill to be able to do my makeup as well as these people do it. The great thing about this place is that although it costs $60 to have done, the $60 is redeemable on products, so you actually get something you can keep out of it.
I think the wedding is going to be a cross between a traditional Greek wedding and a modern wedding, which should be interesting.
Greek weddings are great because they’re such lively, fun, family oriented events. The ceremony is fairly dull (being in another language and all) but once you go to a few, you start to know what each section is about and it’s not so bad. The receptions involve lots of dancing, drinking and then more dancing. That’s the part I’m looking forward to. I love to dance and am lucky enough to have a partner who will dance with me pretty much whenever I ask. Just talking about it is making me get excited! I can’t wait!
*Names have been changed to protect the identities of people with much more boring names
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